Hey! Thanks to the whole Reddit mess, I’ve discovered the fediverse and its increidible wonders and I’m lovin’ it :D
I’ve seen another post about karma, and after reading the comments, I can see there is a strong opinion against it (which I do share). I’d love to hear your opinions, what other method/s would you guys implement? If any ofc
I really like this karma method, but I’m curious about what led the site to going down the tubes for a bit there. Was that in any way a byproduct of the karma system, or other issues entirely?
Major UI changes. It was so hates that a small group forked the code and started Soylent news.org
To be fair, the UI changes were rather bad.
There were a bunch of reasons people left. Personally, I thought the slashdot site redesign really sucked. They ruined the comment section. It was harder to follow comments and it seemed the amount of comments shown varied at random. Sometimes you would only see high rated comments, other times it showed all, even the troll comments. It was weird. And the look of the design was weird. Oversized margins that forced more scrolling. There were a few other things I didn’t like, but those were negligible.
There was also the sourceforge drama where slashdot buried negative articles about sourceforge, its sister company. Hard to trust a site much after.
Overall, its still usable. I still stop in once in a while to read tech news, but that’s it. Those stop ins are getting less and less, too. HN is my main go to for tech stuff.
Why did Slashdot go down the tubes? Nothing to do with moderation, just management screwups similar to the ones Reddit has had a few times. Slashdot was sort of a 1990’s version of Reddit. It was sold a few different times and the new owners tended to try to impose unpopular changes. Those did usually get rolled back.
Re the moderation system itself, I suspect it went through a lot of iterations. Slashdot was die-hard about free speech so had tons of trolls and spammers, but made the karma system work well enough that you could keep away from the trolling unless you chose to browse at -1. I think -2 was added sometime later when -1 was seen as not low enough. Generally you could do ok by browsing at +3. They asked for mods to browse at -1 so that you could upvote stuff that was downvoted wrongly.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#Peer_moderation
It says they killed off anonymous posting in 2019, oh well. I had always thought that was a good feature despite the crap that got posted that way.